Alright I’ll admit it, I’m totally a guy who got into automation because I am lazy! Ask my wife, ask my colleagues, I find the easiest way to do everything I can and if I don’t see direct value then I’m probably not participating. Just ask my friends at dailyhypervisor how frustrating I can be if you’re imposing a model that forces me to do something that takes even seconds for me to switch screens. At the end of the day this isn’t a good thing, but it can be a valuable trait and as such I create things that make my life easier and I suppose at least 1 or 2 of you out there will get some value out of it as well.

I begin this post with that because what I’m going to show you here may not be as valuable as the custom notifications, or the prepare a windows template for software components. However with Sample Exchange growing and I sincerely hope that you are inspired to give back and either use community content, adjust it, make it better, and load your copy back into a place where we can all share, learn and grow together. Let’s apply the great open source mentality to all things automation and orchestration!

So what is it I’m going to walk through here today? How bout a set of workflows that allow you to add or update event subscriptions and property groups without leaving the vRO console? Maybe even provide you with a means to create your own install packages for specific workflows and settings to make it easier for you to share your content? Best of all I’ll start using this method for all my work so you can quickly get up and running with all of work I’m doing!

As I often do here is a video example and in this instance I firmly believe you’ll get more out of the few minutes watching this than the post itself.

Since I’ve already painted the picture as to why this might be valuable to you, here’s the example of our EB subscriptions.

Then if you want to add one for a specific State and Phase you go through the steps like in this image. While I firmly believe you should understand how this works and how you would take advantage of it, after you review my Enabling the Event Broker series you will say to yourself. I got this, now can it be easier?!

After importing the above package you will find these workflows available to you under the VMware -> SDE-SET -> Common -> Installer folders

Add or Update Lifecycle Event Subscription

Add or Update Post Approval Event Subscription

Create property groups

Install Wrapper

Looking at the schema for the Add or Update Lifecycle Event Subscription you’ll see a pretty simple collection of details and then run the out of box workflow to register a subscription. Then if that already exists you’ll be prompted to update or rename the subscription request.

Steps and questions will ask you all of the parts to an event subscription. If you choose no to the subscribe to state and phase it will run the workflow on all events. (Not Recommended but you can always update the workflow)

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Here is the example of the workflow created!

Now what happens if I end up having a subscription with that name already? Then it will give you the option to update existing or just put it into new subscription name.

Next we review the create property groups. Let me give props where they are due, Tom Bonnano from dailyhypervisor did all the the work and I am just reusing it. It simply gives you the ability to pre-create all the property groups for your event subscriptions if you want. *Notice this will not assign any property groups to your blueprints. That still requires you log into vRA and execute

Step 2

Now for the explanation of the install wrapper, what if I want to run both of those together and perhaps do an additional configuration on my particular workflows.

Here’s an example of exactly what it looks like for one of my workflows. I build a configure properties into the installer. Now anyone who wants to use my work will be able to run a quick install and go!

As always comments, and feedback are welcome! I hope this helps you in your day to day vRO/vRA activity.

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gary.coburn

Pure technologist at heart, founder of Extendingclouds, and is considered to be a cloud expert in the IT field with over 15 years experience in Virtualization, Automation, and Cloud technologies. Gary Coburn started in the industry designing and implementing large scale enterprise server and desktop virtualization environments for a global manufacturing firm in West Michigan. Later went on to become a key pre-sales/post sales resource for a Regional SI. In Aug 2010 moved to VMware and have progressively moved from Michigan Enterprise SE, to Regional Specialist, and now a National Specialist
Gary has helped dozens of fortune 100 and 500 enterprises successfully adopt both private and public cloud strategies as part of their IT offerings. The result of which was large operational and capital savings for his customers. Gary continues to help large enterprise customers reach their hybrid cloud strategies at VMware. On Extendingclouds you will find exclusive content that will help you learn how to adopt a successful cloud strategy through the use of VMware Cloud Automation Center, Open Stack, and other industry recognized cloud solutions.

Hello
I followed your posts concerning vRA and it’s very good source for (I’m newbie on vRA).
My challenge now is create a blueprint to deploy VM (1 or more) with a custome name directly in a good datastore cluster and VM folder (PROD, DEV or TEST) and integrated in a specific AD container.
And when we delete a VM the remove operations cleanup the AD registry.
I know I ask too much things, sorry 🙂

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[…] to the work over the past few months it’s all starting to come together. First I created the installer workflows that made it easy to build out a install wizard, then I updated the combination of […]